1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, an information processing system, and an information processing program and is suitably used, for example, to search for content data.
2. Related Art
In recent years, record players being equipped with a recording medium such as a hard disk or a flash memory to play back content data stored in a recording medium were widely spread. In such a type of record player, the amount of recordable content data drastically increased with the increase in size of the recording medium and the advancement of data compressing techniques.
Actually, a record player equipped with a flash memory having a memory capacity of several giga bytes can store several hundreds to several thousands of songs of music data, with each song being several mega bytes in size.
As the amount of content data which can be stored in the record player increases, it is more difficult for a user to search for desired content data, thereby deteriorating the searching ability.
Therefore, in the known record player, for example, searching for desired content data is made easy by classifying the content data into plural groups depending on attributes thereof and switching a search range to search for a group and then to search for content data in the group.
In addition, the music data attributes include genres, album titles, and artists' names, for example.
As an operation device for performing a search operation while switching the search range, an operation device having a rotational operation unit capable of being pushed in and rotated was suggested (for example, see JP-A-2007-35150).
In this operation device, the search range can be switched by performing a pushing operation on the rotational operation unit and the searching operation can be carried out in the switched search range by performing a rotating operation on the rotational operation unit.